Mark Jaquith, who I will probably forever call Mark Jarquith in my mind because that’s how I first read his name, has announced the Release Candidate version of 2.0.6 on the WP-Testers list. I’ve detailed the contents 2.0.6 in this post. Chances are this release will be come before Christmas. So get your blogs ready for the update. Make sure your files and databases are backed up and you are ready to go… And be sure you are sporting your limited edition WordPress shirt as you do it! (Order now! Operators are standing by!)

THEN you need to get ready for the 2.1 release… and it’s a biggy. That will have to wait until after the holidays. If I had to wager, I would say it will be out in early January. When 2.0 was released at Christmas time last year, everyone had to scramble to get their translations and converted and since they had time off from work, the spent the holidays tweaking their sites. And that’s not nearly as much fun as doing it on company time! (JOKING!) So, I’ll include more on that later.

However, you should know that RC1 will NOT be the same as the final 2.0.6 release. There is a security fix that has been completely under wraps till now. It has only been reported to Security@wordpress.org and has not been reported by the security sites. Because of this, the security fix has not been added to the public betas. It is running on several private sites. Automattic did not want to give the bad boys of the web to attack sites that haven’t upgraded.

Ticket #3215 – Login & Update functions everything is broken – PHP can talk to the server in different languages. On servers using the “Fast CGI” language, an error 500 was received when reaching administration pages. The code was rewritten to have special handling for Fast CGI servers.

Ticket #2987 – +/- for bottom boxes on write page acts weird in FF- A CSS style change affected the how Firefox handled the +/- buttons that would minimize and maximize the trackbacks, excerpt, and custom fields on the Write post/page tabs. This fix cancels that 2.0.5 change allowing current Firefox versions to shide and show these fields, once again, with a single click.

Ticket #3267 – PHP Error in template-functions-links.php – The error “PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function get_feed_permastruct() on a non-object ” would crop up in server logs. Correcting the order in which parts of memory were freed has solved the problem.

Ticket #2681 – Error on Inline Uploading after deleting page with attached file – If an attachment existed that referred to a page that was deleted, an error occurred when uploading the next attachment. This has been fixed.

Ticket #3112 – Upload bugs – If you uploaded an image to an empty post, an error would be generated. This fix enables empty post to accept uploads.

Ticket #3367 – Single quote around double quote mysql string breaks on OpenVMS HP-PHP – When programming in PHP some systems allow strings like this: ‘This is a quote “Yahoo”.’ However that will not run on some implementations. This ticked essentially changed the format to something like this “This is a quote ‘Yahoo’.”

Ticket #3051 – QuickTags now work in Safari browser- The “Quick tag” buttons (You know the ones that allow you to highlight a word and change its style by making it a link or bold or whatever) were disabled for people using the Safari (Mac) browsers. Those poor folk had to do all of that by hand because Safari couldn’t use JavaScript to tell where the curser was. That’s been fixed, and so, WordPress can now allow Safari browsers to show those buttons again. This ticket removes the “if safari then hide-them-buttons” code.

Ticket #3391 – Can’t click Labels for Radio Buttons in Moderation Queue – You had to click on the buttons instead of the labels for the buttons. This is non-standard behavior and has been corrected.

Ticket #3438 – Internationalization by mistake- This is a fix for a defect that has not ever made it to the field in a stable version of WordPress. Later in this list you’ll see that ticket 1540 “Internationalizes” several dates. However, some urls cannot be internationalized and still function. The fix for 1540 adjusted two areas that should not have been changed. This tickets addresses that that and reverts those two lines.

Ticket #1540 – Date format returned by wp_get_archives is not localizable – The format of the date returned in the text of this function was hard coded to “Month Year”. Now it depends upon your localized configuration.

Undocumented changes

Additionally there are several changes that have not been linked to a 2.0.6 specific ticket. These tickets may have also been merged with the 2.1 branch. The ticket system can’t link a ticket to two versions. So, this list is reviewed a bit more manually. These changes include (but are not limited to):NEW FEATURE: A new filter has been added to the plugin creator’s repertoire. The “query” filter allows plugins to intercept requests for the query object directly from within wp-db.php’s function query($query) routine. This should lead to some very powerful plugins that can shape the results coming form the database in ways that were not possible with version 2.0.5 and earlier.

OPTIMIZATION: The built in Akismet spam filter plugin was a little over zealous in how often it optimized the database. By reducing the frequency an optimization is done, the workload on your database server will be reduced which might just result in a more consistent response from your website.

FIX: The previous post an next post links did not have a trailing slash. Now they can thanks to a call to “trailingslashit”.

FIX: When a post containing attachements is deleted, the attachements were abandoned in such a way so that 2.0.6 could no upload items to include in a post.

ENHANCEMENT: A filter called “content_filtered_save_pre” was added to help support PHP Strick mode.

FIX: An error used to occur when attaching a file with a post that has no arted specified. This has been corrected.

All in all, these fixes make WordPress compatible with a wider range of hosts. Basically, this is a VITAL release if you are having errors with your current version of WordPress. If you aren’t receiving errors, you will not consider this release quite as vital.